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Songs in Black and Lavender Eileen M. Hayes

Published by University of Illinois Press

Hayes, Eileen M. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music. University of Illinois Press, 2010. Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/18462. https://muse.jhu.edu/.

For additional information about this book

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https://muse.jhu.edu/book/18462

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Is it reasonable to characterize nine thousand white women as “a bunch”?—eileen m. hayes, diary entry

chapter 1

Diary of a Mad Black Woman Festigoer

In the typical arrival story, a familiar aspect of traditional ethnography, the anthropologist acquaints herself with persons unknown and prepares to settle in so that she can begin her “real work.” Although technically this diary does not do precisely that, my intent is that readers will find it a useful intro- duction to themes raised in this book. This includes, but is not limited to, the experience of festivals from the perspectives of black women. Although some readers will be familiar with the women’s music festival scene, most will probably not. Therefore, I sought a vehicle through which I could both describe and signify on women’s music festivals from the perspec- tive of a black attendee. This diary is the result. With an attitude reminiscent of Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the narrative genre of the travel diary provides me entrée to the representation of this different world.1 At six feet, six inches tall, Perry, an Atlanta-based thespian, has made a career of portraying the African American wise-woman-cum-superhero Madea in the plays upon which his films are based, and some of her comedic spirit influences the diary I

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offer.2 That many white readers are unfamiliar with Perry’s work neither detracts from nor influences its success. African Americans who comprise Perry’s target audience for live performances may experience a reality that differs dramati- cally, in their time away from integrated work sites, from the lived experience of whites. A parallel sensibility might be acknowledged in regard to African Americans and the consumer base for women’s music festivals. African American male friends and acquaintances with whom I discussed this book frequently posed the question “What about the [soul] brothers?” Therefore, I emphasize that these festivals are women-centered events—indeed, in the case of Michigan, women-born women events.3 It would not be far off the mark to say that black male-bodied persons identifying as men don’t count in these environments except as infrequent audience members. And as a comedian as sharp as the late Bernie Mac might say, “The brothers don’t get to many lesbian events.” Within these pages, I do not presume to inhabit a black lesbian subject position. I say this not to disavow associations between myself and members of the community in which I conducted research, but rather to underscore, as Michael Awkward relates, that markers of identity ought not necessarily to be deemed sufficient grounds upon which to grant one authority to speak the cul- tural truths.4 This idea undergirds my attempts to intervene in representations of blackness, black femaleness, black lesbianness, and black feminism, but it echoes a formulation put forth earlier by Valerie Smith and Hazel Carby.5 I raise my own identities as a straight, black, and, arguably, old-school feminist activist precisely to question what these inflections mean, singly and in combination. Still, it is telling, as anthropologist Ellen Lewin and linguist William Leap sug- gest, that gay or lesbian identity is almost always attributed to scholars conduct- ing research in lesbian and gay communities.6 The diary entries, or field notes, that follow are a reminder that work in the field of identity politics requires care. The post–Stuart Hall generation has come to expect that positionalities align unevenly, and in unexpected ways.7 This is as true in relation to race identity as it is for gender, sexual identity, class, politics, and so on. In none of these areas does this book assume a unitary subject. My use of the first-person narrative in the diary that follows (and, indeed, throughout this book) is a mode of representation so fundamental to anthropo- logical practice that it requires no justification. And while a number of influences are felt in these pages, that of John Gwaltney’s Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (1981) must be credited at the outset. Gwaltney’s recorded conversa- tions with blacks living in a dozen black communities in the northeastern U.S. in the early 1970s reveal not only their perspectives about their own lives but also their perceptions of blacks as a people and of whites both individually and collectively. Drylongso was just one of Gwaltney’s prescient studies in which he

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argued for a “native anthropology,” an intellectual cause that was taken up by successive generations of anthropologists of color, women, and, later, scholars conducting ethnography in lesbian and gay communities.8 In his comments for the dust jacket for Drylongso, the writer Ralph Ellison maintained that Gwaltney painted a portrait of “core Black America” (Gwaltney’s phrase) that was designed to instruct and entertain. I have tried to infuse some of those qualities into this essay, nodding toward the African American tradition of indirect social criticism through humor. For reasons that will become clear, some readers may never have the oppor- tunity to attend a women’s music festival. I offer the following polyglot (mis)ad- ventures in feminism, lesbian identity, race matters, and music—replete with its reverberations of African American autoethnographical and oral traditions—in the hope that you, too, can experience a real vacation in lesbian utopia.9

The Diary

In August 1995 my friend Cindy Spillane and I drove from Maryland to the twen- tieth anniversary of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In previous years I had attended the festival alone; now I was glad to have Spillane’s company. She and I had met as members of the DC Area Feminist Chorus (Washington, DC), now called the Bread and Roses Feminist Singers.10 Both of us dropped out eventually, for different reasons. I grew weary of being “the only one”—the sistahs know what I mean. Spillane felt strongly that the chorus’s engagement with feminist praxis and music had, in her words, “petrified at about 1975.” “How much Holly Near arranged for four-part women’s voices can one take?” she would ask. I didn’t begrudge the second-wave radical feminism sound track that the chorus’s Near-Williamson-Christian repertoire evoked. Indeed, my own feminist resolve had been fortified by the music of women’s music founders during the years of my young adulthood, and though those years were decid- edly over, women’s music was my music, too. Yet despite attempts to “multi- culturalize” (is that a word?) the chorus’ repertoire with the occasional song by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Spillane and I concluded independently that the group’s raison d’etre was better fulfilled as a voluntary association for social networking than as a choir. Our bond with each other was as feminist activists in the Washington, DC, area. Spillane, a white lesbian, frequently led workshops in the women’s com- munity on antiracism; she was also a fat women’s activist—that is, a fat, fat-issues activist. My feminist organizing had been predominantly with other black women and women of color in reproductive rights advocacy and anti-sterilization abuse. I had been trained by lesbian feminists in the early 1980s and in part was still

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working out the repayment of a symbolic debt owed to the women from whom I learned feminist engagement. For the most part, Spillane “got it” about racism; I won’t make it sound as though she didn’t. I was a veteran feminist activist and didn’t buy into narratives about black women not identifying with the f-word (feminism). It didn’t take an Angela Davis to know that advocating on behalf of oneself as a black and as a woman was part and parcel of black women’s activist heritage (although I’m glad Davis pointed that out).11

gender, play, and transgression

A source of our amusement during the road trip involved our speculating about how festigoers might assume we were girlfriends in the romantic rather than the platonic sense. There would be many couples at this festival, because for many lesbian and bisexual women this particular festival was a favorite place to vacation. Part of the pleasure participants derive from a large festival such as Michigan comes from attendees’ opportunities to be both actors and audience members in the larger social drama that is the festival. In the festival arena, participants enact numerous social performances that contest, combine, and turn identity categories held by many to be fixed—particularly those of gender and sexuality—on their heads. These acts take place onstage, but even more often offstage, as festigoers, “virgin” (first-time attendees) and otherwise, con- duct everyday life at the festival. I looked forward to highlighting in my study what was happening at the ground level in the lives of black women performers and festival attendees. We were going to have a long ride. To pass the time in the car, Spillane and I constructed butch and femme personas for ourselves. Thwarting expectations about what some observers consider markers of butch and femme identities, Spillane and I adopted the aliases of “Bunnie” and “Lambert” respectively. Spill- ane performed “Bunnie” as overtly femme; I enacted “Lambert” as decisively butch. We were playing with stereotypes, but at the same time we understood that we would be subjected to an essentializing gaze while at the festival. Given the recurring trope of the “big, black butch,” it struck us as clever that I, five feet tall and slightly built at one hundred pounds, would play that role, while “built for comfort” Spillane would occupy the femme space.12 We took delight in our theatrics and enacted these personas privately throughout the festival for our own amusement. We listened to the radio and to CDs we had brought along. Since we knew that Michigan, like some other women’s music festivals, strongly encouraged women not to play men’s voices over sound systems, we wanted to get in all the Mick Jagger, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Luther Vandross we could. A self-conscious awareness accompanied our creation of the list. Every

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performer mentioned occupied, if not a gay positionality, an “in-betweenness” with regard to gender, sexual identity, race, or some combination of these. We also listened to Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading, Melissa Etheridge, and k. d. lang during our trip. They were our “girls,” and we wished they were coming to Michigan, too.

black and lavender

About halfway into our road trip, Spillane, who was driving, glanced in my direction: “How is our flag coming?” she asked. Before we left Maryland, I had described how women personalize their tents, recreational vehicles, and grounds in the immediate vicinity of their camps. Festigoers tack clotheslines in the woods so that they might hang beautiful/outrageous quilts, banners, and posters, many of which pay homage to women’s history, lesbian/bisexual/ transgender pride, and other politics. I had heard via the rumor mill that the Michigan festival would be conferring an award for the “best home exterior de- sign” that year. I suggested we enter the contest. Spillane asked what we could do, since neither of us had talents in the domestic arts. I suggested that we take a flag and post it outside the tent. Spillane replied, “You mean a rainbow flag?” I shrugged. “Child, we need something black and lesbian,” I said. “Where will you get that type of flag?” Spillane asked. Reversing herself suddenly, she ex- claimed, “You’re a het [heterosexual]; you can sew!” Little did we know it then, but our hand-sewn nylon flag, the design of which was a black triangle against a background of deep lavender, would become an object of admiration in our campsite neighborhood.

city on a hill

Though I had attended several women’s music festivals previously, including Michigan, Spillane looked forward to her first one. She had wanted to be pre- pared, so before the trip she talked with me and her other friends about what she could expect. I am not sure if, once we arrived, she got what she came for or not. The Michigan ideal is that women will replicate an entire outdoor city—less Athens and more a poor people’s tent city à la 1960s Washington, DC—into which some semipermanent structures, such as stages and commissaries, are introduced. Michigan is about long queues for food, open-air showers, ice cream, infrequent portions of meat, and a public transportation system comprised of flatbed trucks. These vehicles take festigoers from the registration site to camp- ing areas, from the main stage concert area to the special constituency tents at which workshops are held. Each August, those who are familiar with the experience harbor a hope that is familiar to attendees at all residential music festivals, if not participants in utopian projects. “If we build it, they will come,”

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the saying goes, and come they do: some alone, others towing babies and small children, male and female.13 There are a fair number of two-mom families, crones, teens and young adults, and others in recreational vehicles, differently bodied women, interracial couples, dyed blondes and towheads, women with dreads and those with weaves, transgenders, femmes, straight women who re- member what women-identified means, butches, wannabe butches, sexy women and others looking for sex or for Mr. Goodbar (the candy), and—I swear—several hundred men. A few “hopelessly straight” women come, too—some of whom have been lied to about what to expect. After a flash thunderstorm, probably hundreds from each identity group wonder why the hell they’re there. There is no “hill” as the word is used in military parlance, but if there were, we could take it. This is part of the Michigan experience, too: big talk, big Windy City, four-star-general talk by women who are fixed (as my grandmother would have put it) on doing big things. We had heard through the grapevine that more than nine thousand women (predominantly white lesbians) were expected for this outdoor, five- to seven-day event, billed as the largest women’s music festival in the world. What was it about this festival that made it occupy a central place in the women’s music festival imaginary?

women only

In contrast to other women’s (lesbian-oriented) music festivals, Michigan is a women-only gathering; men are not allowed. Indeed, at other festivals, men are now invited to participate both as audience members and sometimes as sidemen, though not as instrumental or vocal leads during performances. Ad- dressing, in the course of Spillane’s preparation for the festival, the various inconsistencies in festival inclusion policies that have arisen over time and location would have been too complicated. Michigan welcomes women-born women of all ages and ethnicities and male children under the age of eleven. During the day, male youngsters go to the Brother Sun Boys Camp; the counterpart to the festival’s day programming for girls is the Gaia Girls Camp.14 The camps are age- and sex-specific. Brother Sun is for young boys ages five through ten; additionally, families with boys agree to reside in the Brother Sun camp for the entire week. The girls camp provides a range of activities and oversight for young females five and older. These accommodations for children are a festival offering that has evolved over the years—and not without debate by festival planners and attendees. Michigan also offers the Sprouts Family Campground for mothers and all children four years of age and under. I am afraid that given my “single woman with no chil- dren or nieces or nephews” centricity, I never sought to visit the boys or girls camp and don’t know if it is possible for nonparents to do so.

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dyke spotting

Toward evening, Spillane and I stretched our legs at a truck-stop diner in Hart, Michigan, the town nearest to the festival site in Walhalla, a small community in west-central Michigan. We were in a rural area and admittedly had been a bit spooked by a small flurry of anti-lesbian sentiment from passersby along the road. This was the last leg of the trip, and we had exhausted our supply of the best and worst scenarios that might befall us at the festival. We hoped our job assignments there would not be too taxing and that Spillane’s tent, which she was borrowing from a friend, would not flood. As we walked into the diner, Spillane joked nervously that the other cus- tomers could “spot us as dykes,” a statement based on the belief that people engage in shared assumptions about visible markers of lesbian identity. She and I were temporarily relieved, however, by the proximity of three large, and as they say, dark-skinned, butch-looking black women in black leather jackets seated at a table near the door. “We are not alone,” I thought to myself. Spillane urged me to approach the women for an interview because, in her words, they were “dykes going to Michigan.” Her comment was audible confirmation that even my longtime feminist associate had lapsed into an essentialist notion of black lesbians.

arrival and registration

The festival was held on a plat of 650 acres of privately owned land in the woods. Upon arriving at the site and walking through registration, which included a brief orientation film, it was time for us to choose our work-shift assignments. From talking with her friends before the trip, Spillane knew that festival partici- pants were required to complete three four-hour shifts as part of their Michigan stay. Various posts were available, but at least one kitchen stint was strongly encouraged. On the one hand, work shifts are voluntary, but on the other, they are vital to the functioning of the festival itself and help foster a spirit of com- munity. At some festivals, attendees can pay a lower registration fee through work exchange. The rules of the workaday world don’t seem to apply here. The work-shift leader may be given a list of her volunteer charges, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for not showing up for an assignment. Still, it seems that most follow through on their commitments. Fulfilling one’s work- shift assignments is a part of establishing one’s festival cred. Food preparation and serving occurs under large mega-tarps—the size of those big-ass tents rich people use for their wedding receptions, but not as nice. The kitchen, if one could call it that, is a wide expanse of outdoor grounds divided into areas for food preparation, cooking, serving, and cleanup. Rank-

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and-file festival attendees service these areas. Paid festival “professionals” man (possibly I’ve used the wrong word here) the large cauldrons of cooking food: vegetarian chili, soup, tofu and vegetables, and the like. Noting the allure of ritualized infatuations that permeate festival environments, Spillane opined, “The pretty girls always get crushes on the paid staff.”

sister (mammy) act

Unlike Spillane, I did not yearn to work in the “kitchen,” no matter how “cute” the “girls” were. I especially did not want to volunteer in the dining area ap- portioning food to a bunch of white women. (Is it reasonable to characterize nine thousand white women as “a bunch”?) The possibility made me think not only of the numbers of black women, past and present, who earned their living in the food service industry but also of the career trajectories of two superb black film actors of the 1930s, Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen. Both were cast in David Selznick’s Gone with the Wind as servants in the O’Hara household. McDaniel successfully parlayed the portrayal of an insubordinate mammy into a lucrative career. Less recognized today is McQueen, who, closer to my body type perhaps, left black audiences laughing and shaking their heads at her incisive portrayals of black house servants. The opportunity to staff one of the long conjoined tables in the dining area struck me as a little “too historical,” and I was not sure I could play the role as well as either of those brilliant performers. If I could pull off the kitchen stint with style and the right combination of performative moves, that would be one thing. There was, however, always the chance that my act would pass unnoticed and that my role-playing would appear naturalized. How many times, after all, has a brother been caught holding the door for a line of whites because they think— granted, on a subliminal level—that he’s the doorman? In the early 1970s my black piano teacher related that white parents would frequently appear at the front door of her home and ask her to announce their presence to the “lady of the house.” From talking with numerous black women at women’s music festivals, I knew that many brought a similar memory of place and race to the kitchen work-shift experience. “You don’t look anything like Butterfly McQueen,” Spillane said. “It’s not about McQueen,” I retorted. “Oh,” Spillane replied, “I thought it was.” It’s not that the white women were racists; I was too sophisticated to sub- scribe to that level of overdetermined analysis. In fact, such a sentiment is no analysis at all; it’s the starting point for everyday conversation. “And besides,” Spillane said, “a few of the white women here have black girlfriends.” Okay, I’m thinking. Is that like saying that white folks aren’t racist because they adopt Chinese national baby girls? I know it’s controversial, but dang—couldn’t they

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adopt some black kids? I did not give voice to these thoughts, and Spillane laughed before I had a chance to utter my usual “Don’t get me started.” To their credit, at least the white women of my generation who I passed at the festival extended a nod of acknowledgment. The same doesn’t always happen in civilian life.

racing the imagination

On the evening of our arrival, we pitched Spillane’s four-person tent, the ca- pacity of which I questioned. I related that at my first women’s music festival, a white woman attendee who I’ll call Jerry warned me that a “cute gal such as yourself ” should be careful “what with all the black studs around.” I am not sure she attended the event first and foremost for the music—but then, many women do not. “That’s so crude,” Spillane said, reacting to the story I told her. She added, “But you are cute.” “Yeah, right,” I said. Though I was struck by the depth of Jerry’s racialized imagination packaged in a well-meaning wrap, I do not mean to conjure her as a working-class fall guy for her silenced middle-class counterparts. Rather, I found Jerry’s remark a disturbing, but perhaps also il- luminating, peephole into some consumer perceptions of music, embodiment, and sexual identity. This reminds me how broad the scope of this book project was in the first place. As my heart raced and my palms began to sweat, I resolved that next time I would narrow it down. How does one cover 650 acres in one week? What guarantees that by attending one event I won’t miss another one of com- parable value? These questions were symptomatic that I was in the middle of a breakdown—what Gayatri Spivak called “cognitive failure,” or that moment when a project is faced by its own impossibility.15 An exaggeration? Perhaps, but things were only going to get worse. What about incidents I had only heard about but hadn’t experienced—the alleged brothel set up for the festival’s paid staff in the weeks leading up to the festival, for example? What operations of race were at play there? According to women I talked with, none of whom were black, the brothel event sparked controversy along the following lines. First, it was open only to those women categorized as festival workers, and not to festigoers in general. Second, it in- spired concerns about the enactment of sadomasochism only in the brothel area. It’s ironic that if the brothel had been situated in a heterosexual context, the nuances of its value might have been missed. The controversy revealed long-standing tensions in lesbian feminist communities between proponents of prostitution and/or sadomasochism between consenting adults, activists’ concern with domestic violence in lesbian relationships or households, and other perspectives.

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stratification in utopia

The Michigan festival is a great communal experiment. Everyone eats the same food, and although it is apportioned buffet style, it is not cafeteria style: there are set menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As the event is designed to be self-contained, it would be almost inconceivable for one to go off-land in search of kung pao chicken or a hamburger. Even if you could leave to find food, our experience driving down the road suggests that you might not feel comfortable doing so. After all, it’s west-central Michigan, not the Bronx. The only vendors at Michigan are the craftswomen in the festival market- place, stretches of land devoted to the selling of lesbian- and feminist-inspired art and work by artisans. The store set up by the festival sells camping-related supplies (batteries, rain gear, personal hygiene products, candy), but festigoers can bring in supplemental food and other items, Even in paradise, everyone is not equal. Musicians may have specific re- quests that the performer care staff can accommodate: special water; private accommodations in a recreational vehicle, tent, or two-star hotel room; or an extra piece of chicken on meat night. (The latter is no unsubstantiated conspiracy theory, although most of those are true, too.) When musicians aren’t giving workshops or performing, they are seldom visible elsewhere on the land. But, then, how would one find them in crowds of Michigan’s magnitude? My guess is that you can’t be a star 24/7—not even in the promised land.

breasts and more breasts

Michigan facilitates one of the largest aggregates of women’s breasts in the world: boobs of all sizes, shapes, nationalities, and colors attached to bodies and minds of varied physical and political dimensions. There are indicators of the failed pink ribbon campaign: some breasts have been surgically removed. Others are enhanced, a few (about two thousand) stand at attention, most droop with pride. It’s this wide expanse of bare-breasted women jamming or dancing together that is described in the literature as “nudity.” In reality, it’s that folks are topless; a much smaller number of women go bottomless, too. The circumstances under which toplessness en masse occurs are interesting to observe. The large aggregates of boobs seem to occur spontaneously and are often spurred on or accompanied by music—say, an informal jam session begun by four or five (white) women playing djembe drums or congas. The combination of the August heat, the euphoria of a predominantly lesbian gathering outdoors, and a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” attitude inspires some women to de-shirt ceremoniously, with a striptease flair. A few women look reluctant to disrobe. As though coerced by the will of the crowd, they also end up taking off their shirts. This is a reminder, as my mother always said, to wear clean un-

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derwear, and not just in case that car accident happens to you. The spontaneous combustion or performance of the crowd does not extend to evening concerts, where a greater sense of formality reigns. In the evening it’s generally cooler, and festigoers wear clothes—sometimes lots of them in an effort to stay warm. At the concerts, whether held on the day stage (lesser status) or the evening stage (highest status), there is also a tacit recognition that the professionals provide the entertainment so that the audience does not have to. At one point, Spillane hoped that her favorite musicians would go topless on stage. Outside of a white butch comedian, however, I had never seen one of the professional musicians—white, Latina, or black—go nude or disrobe to briefs and brassiere during a performance. To answer the inevitable question, yes, I have seen black women at Michigan, in a dancing crowd, enact the dramatic core of Sojourner Truth’s reported speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, and bare their breasts.16 Alternatively, they might go topless in their campsite neighborhoods. If ever asked at a McCarthy-style Senate hearing, however, I can honestly say, “I am not now nor have I ever have been coerced by a crowd to de-shirt, nor have I chosen to do so.” Simply put, going topless was never the way I enacted my feminist identity. That wasn’t the only reason, however. I also had, as historian Mary Frances Berry might say, a long memory of crowd behavior gone badly, whether at a civil rights march or at an ostensibly peaceable demonstration. I could neither trust crowd behavior nor predict it with certainty.

the crush

Working around food makes me hungry. At Michigan, the predominantly volun- teer kitchen staff serves meals for five thousand or more. By kitchen staff I refer not to the professionals paid by the festival, but rather to the supervisory person- nel who provide instruction during the orientation sessions (that is, proper cut- ting of broccoli, efficient corn-husking, pan-scrubbing procedures). Competence in the kitchen, traditionally the domain of women, is highly regarded, especially by festival attendees, many of whom are participants in or spectators of outdoor mass meal production for the first time. After our breakfast of granola and yo- gurt the next morning—I know you know the joke: granola is the white lesbian national food, whatever—anyway, after breakfast the orientation team of which I was a member received corn-husking instruction from a tall, lithe, butchlike, levelheaded blonde. She had an attractive and appealing yet distant and unat- tainable look, similar to that of the lesbian-appropriated heroine of the television adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess.17 I found myself getting a crush on a staff member, just like so many others. The uncompensated physical labor of my African American ancestors notwithstanding, I remember thinking that under our instructor’s supervision, I could husk corn for the rest of my life.

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pressures are rising

After my work shift, I wandered the grounds trying to gain my bearings, looking as though I knew where I was going and that it was my intention to be there. After lunch I washed my dishes (those nonbreakable camping sets work best) in the dishwashing trough—the kind of watering system you find on Texas ranches for horses. I was glad to have brought the biodegradable soap. Privately, I was already craving a Dove bar, a designer ice cream treat I don’t even buy at home, but then again, there was a lot of stress. How was I going to get to the Women of Color tent, meet up with a potential interviewee I met briefly last night, see if it would be possible to visit activists protesting the women-born women admission policy outside the festival proper, and get a psychic reading at the Village Marketplace? For five dollars I could ask Lady Abundantia, self- named after a minor Roman goddess of good fortune and prosperity, if I would finish this book or not. Everyone knows that African American women comprise the highest percentage of American consumers who purchase the services of psychics, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, and crystal-ball seers.18 Holding out hope against a sociological literature that suggests otherwise, black women collectively seem to believe that there is promise at the end of the rainbow, ap- pearances notwithstanding.

doing research

What the fortune teller said is private. Afterward, I retrieved the clipboard and pen from my backpack; it was time to begin my interviews with black festigoers. After establishing a bit of rapport, I would ask the interviewee to tell me her favorite black women-identified musicians so that we could talk about them. “Women-identified” is the name proponents eventually used to refer to the genre; just one reason is that the term women’s music seemed to invoke white, middle-class norms and inspired raised eyebrows. Responses I received initially included mainstream artists such as Janet Jackson and Tina Turner. “Oh, no,” I said to Spillane later. “The women are giving me the wrong answers.” Although we went on to have interesting exchanges, I had really wanted festigoers to talk about artists associated with the women’s music circuit. “Maybe you should change your research design and write a book on Tina Turner,” Spillane said, ref- erencing the rock star we had loved since the days when Ike was a nice guy.19

imagine my surprise

Imagine my surprise—that was also the name of my favorite Holly Near song— when Spillane and another woman, blonde and “well-kept for her age,” trudged in my direction.20 The searing heat would make anybody wilt. Though she was fit, Spillane looked beat; her white companion, on the other hand, chugged

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away as though powered by an Everready battery. “Kathy wanted to meet you,” Spillane said. “Oh,” I replied, “great, I’m Eileen,” and extended my hand. “It’s good to meet you,” said Kathy. Her handshake was limp, like those of some of the undergraduate women I now teach. “Cindy said I could ask a few questions about what it’s like for you as a straight woman at the festival. I’m straight, too, and it’s soooooo different being here.” “Oh, no,” I thought, “I hope she gets to the ten o’clock workshop titled ‘Heterosexual and Bisexual Support.’ Spillane better not plan to bring me stray straight white women throughout our stay here.” I asked the visitor how she was finding the festival—not that I was inter- ested, but she was Spillane’s guest. “Everyone is pretty nice . . . I’m here with a couple girls who tell me that at the concert tonight the emcee will undoubtedly ask the straight women to stand so that everyone can acknowledge them. That’s so cool.” Spillane, who had been wiping the dirt from her hiking boots, raised her head, smirking under her Jane Deere baseball cap. It seemed that Kathy’s friends had deliberately fed her misinformation concerning the benign nature of that “welcome,” and Spillane knew it. Public humiliation via the punch line is a more accurate description of the event that would ensue. “Actually,” I said, “I suggest that you don’t raise your hand—or stand up, for that matter.” “Why not?” Kathy asked. All of a sudden, Spillane rushed away as though she had to catch the last train out of Manhattan, leaving me alone to explain to her friend that her volunteer outing in the concert context would set her up to be humiliated by the comedienne, who routinely made a joke at the expense of straight women.

no shades of gray

At a concert held on the day stage the next afternoon, Spillane and I met some new festival friends, one white and three black lesbians, the latter of whom were an engineer, a firefighter, and a naval officer. I learned that only two of them had known each other before the festival. They were fit, fine—like brown sugar that wouldn’t melt—in a word, cute. The engineer mentioned the cost of traveling to the festival: “Michigan is expensive. Every year you spend a couple hundred bucks on the ticket . . . then about eight hundred dollars to get here and be comfortable.” The naval officer from Virginia asked if I were a “porcelain girl.” She continued, “I just mean, do you like to camp? You either like to camp or you don’t.” Her question about my camping affinities—one that left no room for a middle ground—sparked the thought that I had met few, if any, black fes- tigoers, or musicians for that matter, who identified as bisexual. Sure, a good portion of women had been attached to men at some point in their lives—their children were testimony to that—but no one intimated that such women were bisexual rather than lesbian.21 The naval officer continued, “You either are the type who brings your TV and porcelain dishes to Michigan, or you rough it like

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the rest of us.” I thought, “Geez, is there no space in between? I hate to camp, but I don’t have any of the fineries advertised in upscale camping magazines.” For the naval officer, there was no room for ambivalence. I excused myself.

language matters

I found the PortaJane—but so had two hundred others. Lines moved pretty fast. The festival lexicon as we know it is a legacy of 1970s cultural feminism, when language was used as a tool to raise consciousness.22 For feminist and lesbian participants in the women-identified music network, for example, the respelling of “women” as “womyn” or “wimmin” (omitting the root “man”) was a marker of sexuality as well as of gender. I say “was” because people seem to apply the spellings with a greater sense of irony now. Maybe it’s a sign that time is passing.

gender flow/race flow

Spillane was pleased with her work-shift assignments. After careful delibera- tions, she opted for three shifts: one in the kitchen, one that could employ her skills and experience as an antiracism trainer and activist, and one in security. Security detail included various functions, some pragmatic, such as parking, traffic flow management, and tending to emergencies, and others that were more symbolic. Security team personnel helped regulate and monitor the flow of gendered bodies onto the festival grounds, referred to by participants wist- fully as “the land.”23 One of their duties was to enforce the festival’s policy of admitting women-born women only, the effect of which meant that not only were men (and boys over age eleven) barred from the festival but also those who identified as male-to-female transgenderists. The plethora of references to “the land,” the multicolored dream-catchers on display at the festival marketplace, the burning of herbs, and an “essen- tialist vision of women’s intrinsic connection to the earth,” proves, as Philip Deloria observes, that anyone can “play Indian,” to which I add, feminist or not.24 Over the years, Native American festival attendees—not those whose heritage includes black, Scottish, Irish, and Cherokee, but women who identify as Indian 24/7—have worked to raise festival consciousness in regard to their inappropriateness of “Indian play” by non-Indian Americans. Something tells me they need to work harder. Following our exchange about the Michigan admittance policy, Spillane asked me to share instances of exclusion women of color have experienced. I immediately thought of the Women of Color tent. Founded by Amoja Three Rivers, the Women of Color tent was one of the large networking tents spon- sored by the festival.25 For many years, Three Rivers, Blanche Jackson, and

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others advocated for a greater voice for black, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women at the music event. Participants describe being drawn to the tent because of the opportunities it provides to meet with other women of color. Moreover, it gives them a physical and discursive space that is sepa- rate from the madding crowds of white women. According to the African American women I interviewed, although festivals are generally thought to be lesbian-friendly places of recreation, women of color often experience what one black woman described as “white overload.” Black women therefore may seek refuge from whites for a while. It is ironic that the type of white overload that black women and other women of color might experience at women’s music festivals may in fact mirror their experiences at their workplaces or, possibly, in their neighborhoods. I made a note to ask someone about this. Black women related incidents in which the politics of skin color were played out in the Women of Color tent a few years earlier. The ethnic/political allegiance of lighter-skinned women was questioned by women of darker hues. “That’s deep,” Spillane said. Next, I told her about an incident I had observed firsthand: an evidently white mother stood near the open-sided Women of Color tent, providing visual supervision for her mixed-heritage (biracial) daughter, who was participating in a drumming workshop for women of color. It did not take a mother to realize the poignancy of the moment. “Wow, this race s——t is f——d up,” Spillane said. “I know,” I replied, “I know.”

white looks

Spillane learned that over the years, many white women have yearned for their own space at the festival, similar to that occupied by the Women of Color tent. “But the whole festival is white!” I said. In response, the White Women’s Patio was accepted as a programmed event at the festival.26 The Patio itself consisted of several chairs in a designated area of grass and dirt several hundred feet from the Women of Color tent. That year, the Patio sponsored antiracism workshops, in which activists worked with women on feelings of entitlement that inspired them—ironically, given the ratio of whites to nonwhites at the event—to yearn for a white-identified space comparable to that of the Women of Color tent. The Patio staff also worked as patrollers, encouraging traffic flow around the Women of Color tent, as visual surveillance by white curiosity seekers was frequently reported by those inside. Having experienced this type of visual surveillance at the festival as well as in public venues off-land, I remarked to Spillane that things were “better this year in part, because of the Patio’s efforts.” We laughed over the event’s appellation and were smug in our recognition that Patio participants would be credited for their efforts in diverting the hard and steady gazes of white festival attendees from the Women of Color tent.

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to be real

It surprised me that there were not more women of color at the Women of Color tent when I went there to hang out in the afternoons. On the positive side, fewer women at the tent gave me more time to spend with each person who was willing to fill out my survey. The questionnaire was my way of getting to know people so that we could talk more in depth at a later time. Most everyone, it seemed, assumed I was lesbian. In the festival environment, white women gave me a metaphorical lesbian pass; if black women didn’t extend to me the same benefit of the doubt, they never let on.

appropriating africa

Toward the end of the third day, it seemed as though I had walked for miles. In the late afternoon, I rested near the area reserved for stacks of watermelons. That simple gesture struck me also as historical, and I was awash in self-con- sciousness. Momentarily, I observed a trio of black festigoers begin to play a shekere, cowbell, and calabash—instruments often considered to be African—in interlocking patterns. Clearly, they were enjoying the interaction. Soon after- ward, two white women playing African instruments joined them, and before long, many more white women joined the informal jam session. Some time passed, and eventually the three black women left the group. The next day, in the Women of Color tent, I overheard one of them talking about how the white women always take over. Another woman voiced a version of this sentiment in expressing her regret about missing a drumming workshop with Ubaka Hill, ostensibly, she suggested, because of its enormous popularity with white festival participants. Her question, “How come the white women get Ubaka and we don’t?” reverberated in my consciousness throughout the festival. Later I learned that it was precisely the sense of exclusion festigoers described that prompted festival producers and the Women of Color series to schedule drumming work- shops for women of color only. The incident revealed that group lessons with Ubaka Hill, a musician whom many festigoers, black and white, considered a drumming goddess, was also one of our civil rights.

getting ready for the concert

After dinner we dashed to the tent for a quick nap before the evening’s show. Spillane was lying on her Snugpak mummy sleeping bag, a bag that supposedly could withstand temperatures of five degrees Fahrenheit. (My ultralight bag didn’t have a name; I got it on sale at a local discounter.) Lying on her back, Spillane was absorbed in the festival program booklet, already so wrinkled it looked as though it wouldn’t last the week. “Anybody black playing tonight?” I asked. Spillane shook her head. “You know they save the best ’til last,” she said. What she meant was

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that the veteran black musicians would perform later in the week. I looked for a clean pair of socks; Spillane kept reading. Every once in a while, we broke the silence and talked about how we had slayed the dragon and survived for another day. To hear us tell it, you would have thought we had climbed Mount Everest. When we awoke ninety minutes later, we were almost late. Grabbing our blankets, insect repellant, and folding chairs, Spillane wondered whether she should go with the lavender or pink jacket. “Choose one,” I said, and off we went to enjoy an evening of music and comedy with six thousand others.

lights out

We returned to the campsite on foot rather than wait in line for a truck. As we stuffed ourselves into our sleeping bags, Spillane reflected on our experiences leading up to our arrival. “I hope I meet somebody,” Spillane said. “You’ll always have me, just in case you don’t,” I replied. She continued, as though my words did not register. “Remember that diner we went to?” I nodded affirmatively, but really, I was dead tired. “You gotta admit they [the women in the diner] looked a lot like Bessie Smith,” she said, referring to a narrative, frequently circulated in women-identified music spheres (by white women), about the popular black vaudeville blues singer and reports of her lesbian (but, signifi- cantly, not bisexual) identity. I was too exhausted to explore racialized elements of thought and feeling, identity politics and music. I squeezed her hand, said that we would “process” the issue in the morning, and rolled over.

Unpacking My Bags at This Location

To a certain extent, this book engages in the very project of processing that I promised Spillane we would get to the next morning—though what I aim to theorize is a much wider range of issues that emanate from black women’s participation in the women’s music festival scene. The diary is singular in the women’s music festival literature in that it privileges the perspective of a black festigoer as opposed to that of a musician or white festival attendee. In fact, this book’s underlying theme derives from an understanding I gleaned from black festigoers in the early years of my research: according to some black women I interviewed—a triangle that was half black, indicating black racial identity, and half lavender, indexing lesbian collectivity—was symbolic of their identities as black lesbians. Lisa Powell, an attorney and black activist I met at the now- defunct West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival (California), was one of the first festigoers to voice this formulation aloud. Powell shared her plans to reinvigorate with music a weekend retreat for the group she cofounded in 1990, United Lesbians of African Heritage (ULOAH).27 Speaking of “sisters [black

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women] who don’t pass” but who have not “assimilated into lesbian culture,” Powell said, “I have to encourage them to like black and lavender.” Black women said that the colors of black and lavender spoke to black women’s experiences “more loudly” than did those of the rainbow flag, the multicolored banner designed by Gilbert Baker in 1978 and adopted as the sym- bol of the gay and lesbian nation.28 A critique of the queer nation’s discourses of inclusion—and the skills in semiotics necessary to read the indicators of citizenship—emerges from my interviews. The firefighter I interviewed at the MWMF put it this way: “How come there is no black in the rainbow flag?” This statement alone was worth the price of the ticket. Who knows whether she had taken courses in African American history as part of her college degree? Indeed, I do not know that she had a degree, but in her critique, levied as a question, there were echoes of Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech before the Credential Committee of the 1964 Democratic Convention held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The civil rights leader and former sharecropper is remembered for her powerful entreaty that the Mississippi delegation seating be opened to include blacks. Hamer’s address, punctuated with the phrase “I question America,” was a scathing indict- ment of the failures of participatory democracy.29 As black political philosopher Joy James observes, African American attachments to historical figures such as Hamer and Emma Lou Baker have deep political and emotional resonance and rootedness.30 I heard the firefighter say all of that. In the chapters that follow, I attempt to unpack my interactions with women at festivals I attended and interpret them alongside interviews and other research that I conducted over a number of years.31 In its tendency to eschew conven- tional distinctions between musicians and consumers, this book contributes to discussions carried on by those who are fascinated by the complete range of black women’s “musicking,” a term coined by ethnomusicologist Christopher Small to refer to everything and everybody in the music environment.32 In light of that understanding, now commonplace in ethnomusicology, I draw attention to the aesthetics of women’s music and intervene in the politics of representa- tion of those same systems. While this book might knock on the door of leisure studies, I do not hold out hope for that, outside of the literature on tourism. By and large, studies of African American leisure attempt to correlate and quantify risk factors, such as heart disease, with certain leisure activities, such as bass fishing.33 The women whose participation facilitated the completion of this book experience a different type of risk. One of the goals of this book is to connect the black pathways in women’s music to larger processes of African American life in terms of music and com- munity membership. In shedding light on salient issues, I take the discursive liberty of making festivals the center of a much larger world. Throughout this book, I refer to women’s music festival sites as metropoles—a redeployment of

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a term some postcolonial scholars use as a gloss for the urban centers to which they migrate from their native countries.34 I also borrow from U.S. voter theory when I propose that gay and lesbian cultural geographies and examinations of African American musical soundscapes be redistricted so as to inspire greater representation of black gay and lesbian cultural and social life. Both black music studies and gay and lesbian studies can benefit from a centripetal force of such magnitude that previously marginalized or spectacularized voices are catapulted to the epicenter of theory and analysis. This effort entails decentering not just whiteness but also received ways of thinking about women’s music culture, the workings of race, and, as numerous observers contend, notions of citizenship in overlapping and competing communities.35

To many living in predominantly Latino or African American communi- ties, the suggestion of redistricting is tantamount to the issuance of fighting words. I draw on the notion of “fighting words” articulated by both philosopher Judith Butler and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins as the conceptual bridge to ameliorate two manifestations of a neglect in scholarship.36 The neglect of black gay and lesbian life in all aspects of scholarship outside of literature and film is paralleled by the omission of black women, and women’s music in particular, from the history and discourse of black cultural production, including music. The music scene that is the focus of this book is a reminder that not all facets of African American musical life can be neatly accommodated through a historical lens or through examinations organized around notions of stylistic develop- ment. The latter is evident in curricula that suggest that the blues evolved into polyphonic New Orleans–style jazz, which transitioned into the big band sound, which morphed into bebop. The latter mode of analysis might make for efficient pedagogy, but it actually sheds less light on the persistence of musical styles over different time periods and music making that falls outside of contexts typically investigated by scholars. The privileging of stylistic development tends to elide musical influences from unanticipated sources, and it places certain types of musical hybridity outside the master narrative of black music. These modes of analyses also render the music making of black women invisible, wherein their experience of gender is treated as an afterthought. While it is true that the music of the vaudeville blueswomen of the 1920s gave voice to a sexual politics that reflected and influenced the lived experience of working-class black women at the time, it would be wrong to assume that the musicians of this study are the “daughters,” or, to carry the metaphor of the fam- ily further, the “granddaughters,” of those earlier musicians. Although inspiring and useful in building broad arguments, assumptions of the latter are reductive and belie the numerous influences and differences that distinguish the context for the emergence of classic blues in the 1920s from that of women’s music in the 1970s.37 Moreover, metaphors associated with the family prove inadequate

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for unraveling the threads that contribute to black women’s subordination.38 An overemphasis of lines of continuity between the sexual identity politics of the vaudeville blueswomen and the musicians of this study fails to shed light on the specificity of factors, musical and political, that account for the presence of black women collectively in women’s music. The redistricting I offer in the presentation of this book has been influenced by postcolonial, African American, and white scholars whose challenges to re- ceived epistemological frameworks have enabled many to imagine new vistas in theory and retool old ones. Taking an investigatory road less traveled would mean that the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival would be decentered in analy- ses of women’s music culture. To discuss the Michigan festival as though it is representative of all women’s music (lesbian-identified) festivals underestimates the significance of those that are regionally based and attract women from more localized geographical areas. A focus on the Michigan festival to the exclusion of others deflects attention from sites of all-black women’s lesbian festivals, or all- Chicana women’s music events, or other women’s music festivals geared toward different constituencies of lesbian-identified women. As critics have said for more than three decades, there is no unitary and homogeneous lesbian culture. Even if women’s music festival purists insisted that newer festivals (such as those that started in 1995 or later, for instance) needed to demonstrate a political or cultural connection to the other festivals before they would be officially consid- ered part of the network, reinscribing a smaller, rather than broader, palette of lesbian festivals would serve the “women’s community,” if this term has valence anymore, in ways that run counter to its own goal of inclusivity.

This book is organized by theme rather than by chronology or festival location. Perhaps sociologist Howard Becker says it best: “The ideas within are not a seam- less web of logically connected propositions . . . but they are an organic whole.”39 Indeed, the book’s organization underscores that this is not a study of women’s music but, as Clifford Geertz might have reminded us, is one that has been done in that context.40 The next chapter, under the guise of “reconnaissance,” offers a discussion of my research methods and approaches, as well as a look at how women’s music and black women’s participation in it figures as a vanished sub- ject. I take care to distinguish the festivals of this book from some other women- centered events in popular culture because of my belief that greater rather than less orientation is necessary for the general reader—especially those who are familiar with the logics of black feminisms that have, in the public sphere, been commodified, mainstreamed, or de-radicalized, as argued by Joy James.41

The third chapter offers a way of thinking about black women’s involvement in women’s music in the aftermath of the passing of the golden age. I propose an

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approach to understanding differences between an early generation of musicians and audience members and more recent arrivals to the scene. In a section that might otherwise have been titled “How I Got Over,” first-generation musicians share their assessments of the women’s music ideal in both sonic and political terms. Headliners critique and participate in the circulation of nostalgia as they address the musical underneath or musical aspects of a white cultural feminism. The fourth chapter maintains this focus on perspective but shifts to consider the “nappy roots” of women’s music—that is, an American music discourse that is richly imbricated by uneven exchanges between black and white musical cultures and rich, intertwining, and contested feminist legacies. This chapter’s exploration is predicated upon multiple streams of musical and political influence. The point is that numerous musical traditions have mattered to black women in women’s music—from soul, pop, and funk of the sort that Spillane and I listened to in the car on the way to Michigan—to the African-influenced drumming of artists like Ubaka Hill, the urban folk-infused music of an artist like Tracy Chapman, and the fusion of many of these traditions in the performances of Sweet Honey in the Rock. The chapter concludes with the “coming out” stories of several musicians of the first generation describing how, through involvement in various social and musical networks, they became involved in women’s music. This section reveals and is revealing of how these overlapping histories at the local and national levels are entangled with their own lives and musical careers. Far from being a project of the past, activism in the women’s music scene is emphatically a large part of what continues to draw women to festivals and to make their participation as festigoers and musicians meaningful. The outcome of these efforts, however, reveals ambivalences and disjunctures. The fifth chapter considers both the ideals and idealism that continues to animate the women’s music scene—utopian ideals of community of the sort expressed in the very creation of a “city on a hill” like the Michigan festival. Some of the fissures in the women’s music community that persist despite (and in some cases because of ) these ideals are present as well. I devote particular attention in this chapter to attempts to promote multiculturalism at women’s music festivals and how they fall short or fail, as well as to how black women have responded to the open invitation of festival organizers to join them—meaning white lesbians—often in the woods. In chapter six, I dream of a world—an all-black lesbian world, that is—and explore ramifications of dreams that actually come true. The focus of this chapter is twofold: a music festival for queer women of color and an all-black lesbian retreat. Themes include relationships between different political generations of black lesbians and the familiar trope of returning home. The reconstitution of the feminist project in a changed social and political context reverberates in the last three chapters of this study, the first two of which take up issues of

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identity politics, feminist activism, and the future of women’s music festivals through interviews with two groups of women who are largely invisible in the Michigan diary: a younger cohort of musicians and festival organizers. Chapter 7 weaves a set of interviews with a “next” generation of black women musicians in which they address how they came into the women’s music scene; their rela- tionship to an earlier political and musical generation; and their understandings of feminism, queer identities, blackness, and music. Chapter 8 uses interviews with women to reveal their roles in supporting festival production, whether as board members, volunteers, or festival “workers.” Chapter 9, finally, considers the phenomenon of “drag kinging” (the staged performance of masculinity) and the decades-long controversy over the Michigan festival’s exclusion of male-to-female transgenders on the grounds that they are not “womyn-born womyn.” Here, I interrogate the central role that the Michigan festival played in the community’s definition of the boundaries of membership, with special attention to black women musicians’ and festigoers’ views on these subjects. The events recorded in the diary make clear that sexual identity is often at least seemingly on display at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, with butch- and femme-identified lesbians performing and searching for visible cues of sexual identities, as Spillane and I anticipated with our “Bunnie” and “Lambert” personas, and as Spillane reinforced with her statement about the “dykes going to Michigan.” It is worth asking how such understandings map onto drag king performances, which make the performance of masculinity (by women) a spectacle to be enjoyed by festigoers (almost always women, usually lesbians, and often self-identified feminists), as well as onto the controversy over Michigan’s now-relaxed admittance policy, which denied the rights of festival citizenship to male-to-female transgenders. The book concludes with some final reflections on the contours of the study and a few words about areas for future research. Although true appen- dixes are typically held to be tangential to books of this type, the list of artists that appears in the section titled “Dreamgirls” will be of particular interest to those who are intimately familiar with this music scene. While the hopes of some women’s music festival culture veterans might be thwarted by the lack of pictorial references, I would offer that the latter can be accessed via musicians’ Web sites. For decades, women’s music festivals discouraged the taking of photographs or video at festival events, a directive that bears on the researcher’s ability to offer visual (and aural) ephemera that attest to being there. Even so, visual images are not transparent vehicles of representation. Given that this book does not address musicians’ roles in producing such images, I thought it best not to ignore the rhetorical ambivalence that per- vades black women’s relationship to visual culture or to reinscribe its practice, however well-intentioned.42

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Songs in Black and Lavender reveals women’s music festivals as sites of black women’s musicking and theorizing about gender, race, sexual identity, and other issues that fall broadly under the rubric of politics with a small p. If this book exhibits a multiple address, it is because it is directed to a readership comprised of different, and sometimes overlapping, factions of interest. It is now a widely adopted convention for authors to assert as much. While I do not wish for otherwise, I admit to having a more specific audience in mind as well. I write thinking of a young black man in my life, college age, who maintains that he is “homo-tolerant, but not homo-friendly.” I think of young adult women of all backgrounds, who, in contrast to the ways their collective political conscious- ness is represented in the media, seek a way in—to feminism, lesbian cultures, activism on their own behalf, and, yes, perhaps, to guitar lessons. A black Marxist scholar friend of mine insists that there is no place for examination of gay and lesbian cultures in African American studies. As scholar Charles Nero points out, gay neighborhoods are still white, and, I add, it is worth inquiring what kinds of political distresses are reflected in segregations of all types.43 I believe that there is hope for the hopelessly straight kin among us to grasp the signifi- cance of the issues discussed herein and to go forward in the quest for justice. These potential readers, known and unbeknownst by me, are members of the families I choose, and I write with them in mind.44

Recalling the vignette sketched in the diary entry, the hand-sewn flag peeks out from behind a cabinet in my office. This flag is symbolic of a special journey— one that has been traveled by more “brave” women than I can acknowledge here.45 This book builds on early touchstones in the continuum of influences along my path of intellectual and activist engagement with this topic. My intent is not to contribute to an African American cultural analysis that is overdetermined by an emphasis on black women’s activism and resistance, even if it is through music. All too often, black women’s “racial awareness,” as scholar Paula Stewart Brush calls it, is represented as though, like Topsy, it also “jes’ grew.”46 In the complex field of politics, resistance is by no means always subversive of power, and so in all of these matters a more nuanced approach is warranted. A productive way to think about women’s music is through the lenses of containment and possibility. The improbability of black women “coming to voice” through women’s music is as sobering as the potential for doing so is inspiring.47 Through music performance, consumption, and their involvement in women’s music festivals, predominantly black lesbian musicians and music consumers enact their affinities with both lesbian (lavender) and African American (black) communities. Over the years, African American women identifying in various ways have performed at or attended women’s music festivals. This book argues that their collective experience in those venues represents a significant moment in the history of African American thought.

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